love and triumphs of the human spirit. They enjoy seeing an older woman hav- ing her pick of men; they hate seeing a child in danger. Particularly once they reach thirty, these women are the most "review-sensitive": a chorus of critical praise for a movie aimed at older women can increase the opening weekend's gross by five million dollars. In other words, older women are discriminating, which is why so few films are made for them. Older men like darker films, classic genres such as Westerns and war movies, men protecting their homes, and men behaving like idiots. Older men are easy to please, particularly if a film stars Clint Eastwood and is about guys just like them, but they're hard to motivate. "Guys only get off their couches twice a year, to go to Wild Hogs' or '3:10 to Yuma,'" the marketing consultant Terry Press says. "If all you have is older males, it's time to take a pill." Studio marketers have a few rules for making their films seem broadly " I bl " re a ta e: Can't we all get along? In "Stomp the Yard," which was about an urban street dancer who goes to college, the poster showed the Mrican-American hero with his back turned, leaving his race indeter- minate. The campaign for "Bring It On" portrayed the story as a rivalry between white and black cheerleading squads, even though more than eighty per cent of the film was about the white squad. The first marketing materials for Foxs X-Men franchise showed only an "X." Why ex- clude half your audience? If the poster shows a poster child, the movie is for kids. Posters are intended to tell you the film's genre at a glance, then make you look more closely. Horror post- ers, for instance, have dark backgrounds; comedies have white backgrounds with the title and copy line in red. Because stars are supposed to open the film, and because they have contractual approval of how they appear on the poster, the final image is often a so-called "big head" or "floating head" of the star. Every poster for a Will Smith movie features his head, and for good reason: he is the only true movie star left, the only one who could open even a film about beekeeping monks. Everybody's a comedian. Any drama with at least three funny moments in it will be portrayed, in the trailer and TV spots, as a comedy. The trailer for the 2005 film "The Squid and the Whale" conveyed a measure of the film's delicate unease, but it was basically a series of wry exchanges. A joke, particularly a pratfall, is self-contained, whereas a sad or anxious moment is hard to convey briefly and out of context. If it's called "The Squid and the Whale," it's somebody else's problem. That movie was produced by Samuel Goldwyn Films, an independent studio, and grossed seven million dollars-quite good for a small film, but not for a studio release. If a mov- iè s title and stars don't tell you almost ev- erything you need to know about a film- "Get Smart," starring Steve Carell, say-marketers worry. Fox had to spend a little extra to sell "The Devil Wears Prada," because casual moviegoers won- dered what Meryl Streep was doing in a horror film. When a movie underper- forms, an awkward title is often seen as the culprit. Always cheat death. People die in mov- ies; they almost never die in trailers. They are courageous ("The Express") or miss- ing ("Changeling") or profoundly alive ("Revolutionary Road"). "If a movie is completely, one hundred per cent about death, then it's also about life, right?" Foxs co-head of marketing, Tony Sella, told me. The only thing marketers can't pull o Sella acknowledged, is "selling old to young"-persuading kids to see a movie like "Driving Miss Daisy." "You can try with"-he adopted a baritone . "' Y d ' k h VOlce-over- ou on t now were you're going, but herès what it's going to look like when you arrive.' But they usu- all ' s I ' ll ' ,,, y say, crew you, walt. T wo days after the 'W." première, Tim Palen and Sarah Greenberg were sitting in a theatre in Sherman Oaks, California, thumbing their BlackBerrys before a test screening for "Chilled in Miami," when they were visited by Paul Brooks, the film's producer. A romantic comedy starring Renée Zellweger, "Chilled in Miami" was to be released in late January. Zellweger plays an eager ex- ecutive in a Miami-based conglomerate who flies to a small town in Minnesota to figure out whom to fire at the local plant. An earlier screening had had mixed re- sults. 'We made all the changes the last screening suggested," Brooks said, "so if the film tests for shit, it's NRG's fault." (Nielsen NRG, which conducts test screenings, is one of Hollywood's leading research companies.) Everyone smiled, a little carefully. Palen had explained the film to me earlier by saying, "Did you see 'Baby Boom'? It's that. It's that without the baby." He had been working to make a compelling trailer, using David Schneiderman, at Seismic Productions, who cut trailers for "The Devil Wears Pradà' and "Sex and the City." Paul Brooks wanted the trailer to be primarily comedic, but Palen felt that it needed an emotional through-line, "the stuff that tugs on the ovary." Schnei- derman says that Palen's reaction to his first pass "was the worst: Where's the Mary Tyler Moore?' He said, 'This girl goes to this little town in Minnesota and shè s a cold person, and they warm her up, right? More warmth, more style, more "Devil Wears Prada.'" And I said, 'I don't know where that is in the movie.' And he said, 'Create it.'" Palen often uses a jokey shorthand to convey the sort of campaign he wants; his internal name for "Chilled in Miami" was "The Devil Wears Patagonia." He referred to "Good Luck Chuck," a crit- ically lambasted R -rated comedy star- ring Jessica Alba, as "There's Something About Jessica," and cut the TV spots to emphasize Alba's tumbles and mishaps. "We cheated it and got the film open, which was kind of a feat," he says. "America likes cheese." (When I e-mailed Palen to tell him that 1'd watched the film, he replied, "Can you get workman's comp?") Each maneuver and ad buy in Palen's campaigns is detailed in a confidential playbook. For marketers, much of the science of marketing is determining which old movie your new movie is most like, so you can turn to that mov- ie's playbook as a rough guide. Much of the art of marketing is developing a campaign that reassures moviegoers that the new film is very similar to (or at least "from the director of") another one they liked. The top-ten-grossing mov- ies of the last decade were all "pre- awareness" titles: movies like "Spider- Man" whose stories the audience already knew from another medium, or sequels. Familiarity breeds comfort until it sud- denly breeds contempt. "Will Ferrell did great doing the same sports comedy over and over," a leading marketing THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 19, 2009 45